It’s sundown in America

Do nothing as the slaughter in Syria continues? Critics will say he’s weak, he lacks strategic vision, he’s indifferent to the suffering that Bashar al-Assad’s regime is inflicting on the Syrian people, and he doesn’t care whether Assad thumbs his nose at international law.

Take military action in Syria? Critics will say he’s a reckless hawk, he lacks strategic vision, he’s indifferent to the suffering a U.S. air campaign will inflict on the Syrian people, and he’s thumbing his nose at international law.

It’s not just Syria. It’s Egypt, too, and the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring. It’s the no-win endless war against al-Qaida and the no-win soon-to-end war in Afghanistan. It’s the failed “reset” with Russia and the stillborn “pivot” to Asia. Look to your left, look to your right: You won’t see many defenders of Obama’s foreign policy these days.

But though Obama deserves some of the blame for his current predicament, it’s not all his own fault. He’s hamstrung by changes in global power structures, hampered by Americans’ national unwillingness to hear unpleasant truths, and forced into the appearance of hypocrisy by his reluctance to tell us what we don’t want to hear.

Here are three uncomfortable truths Obama surely knows but won’t say:

1. The American century is truly over.

America is a declining power. Because we live in Lake Wobegon, where every child is above average, you’ll never hear the president acknowledge this in public, but it’s true. Deal with it.

Blame “the rise of the rest.” Europe, despite its various woes, has become a major power. China, India and Brazil are playing ever larger roles on the world stage, and Russia is still strong enough to be a potent spoiler. Yes, the U.S. is still the world’s most powerful state, but our relative power is declining as other states flex their political and economic muscles.

Blame technology. Technological change has made us less autonomous than we used to be. Blame air travel, the Internet and the cell phone, which have collectively ushered in an era in which virtually everything — people, ideas, images, money, weapons, pollution, viruses — can zoom quickly around the globe. This, in turn, has created a host of problems no single state can solve alone. We’re are no longer the sole authors of our national destiny.

America is a declining power. Because we live in Lake Wobegon, where every child is above average, you’ll never hear the president acknowledge this in public, but it’s true. Deal with it.

And let’s save some blame for ourselves. The country has made a hash of things. We squandered much of our moral credibility after the 9/11 attacks (torture and secret prisons) and wasted trillions of dollars on wars as ruinously expensive as they were politically inconclusive. Our current counterterrorism policies (drones, surveillance by the National Security Agency) are angering even our closest allies. Domestically, we’re also in trouble: Our infrastructure is an embarrassment, our public education system has been allowed to decay, we lock up a higher percentage of our population than any country on Earth — we’re even too fat to fight. Not to mention, our domestic political system is broken, and the bipartisan rancor on Capitol Hill makes it hard to imagine turning any of this around.

2. No one really cares what we think, and we can’t fix much of anything.

The United States no longer has the ability to mold the world into the shape it prefers. Countries that once courted us no longer trouble to seek our approval or agreement; our allies remain polite, but just barely, and our adversaries are increasingly willing to thumb their noses at us in public.

Sure, everyone’s still happy to take our money — what little we have left — but even our wealth no longer buys much influence. The Egyptian military takes the $1.3 billion in aid we provide each year but ignores us when doing so suits it; the Egyptian military knows others will step forward to fill its coffers if we have a sudden attack of conscience. The Pakistani government takes our money and helps our enemies. Even our puppets refuse to act like puppets: We’ve has handed over endless suitcases of cash to Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government, and all it has gotten us is a “partner” who denounces us on a regular basis.

So you want Obama to “fix things” in Syria or Egypt or Afghanistan? How? We can’t even fix the public schools in the nation’s capital. Why would anyone imagine we can fix things anywhere else?

3. Breaking things has become our main talent.

America has become a wounded giant. We’re steadily weakening, but we’re still strong enough to hurt a lot of people as we flail around. We can still summon up awesome destructive power, and in a world in which fewer and fewer people care about what we think or even need our money, it’s increasingly tempting to fall back on brute force.

Back in 2001, we ousted the Taliban in a matter of weeks. In 2003, we pushed Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Baghdad in similarly short order. In 2011, we demolished Moammar Gadhafi’s military in a brief air campaign. So yes, we can teach Syria’s Assad a lesson he won’t forget (if one assumes he actually controls his own forces, which is far from certain): We can destroy his chemical weapons production capabilities, bomb his planes and flatten his tanks.

Breaking things can feel satisfying, but as we’ve seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, it only gets you so far. U.S. missile strikes against Assad’s forces won’t turn Syria into a stable democracy. They won’t discredit or destroy Syria’s al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra. They probably won’t stop the Syrian civil war either. As an ill-timed but candid letter from Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) noted on Aug. 19: “(T)he use of U.S. military force can change the military balance, but it cannot resolve the underlying and historic ethnic, religious, and tribal issues that are fueling this conflict … (V)iolent struggles for power will continue after Assad’s rule ends.”

So you want Obama to ‘fix things’ in Syria or Egypt or Afghanistan? How? We can’t even fix the public schools in the nation’s capital. Why would anyone imagine we can fix things anywhere else?

The costs of living in Lake Wobegon:

Obama is no one’s fool. He understands that U.S. influence is declining and that our still-unparalleled power to destroy can tempt us into disaster. But he won’t say any of this straight out.

Instead, he skates delicately around the edges of straight talk. He suggests that America can’t solve all the world’s problems. He reminds us, as he did in a CNN interview this month, that “the situation in Syria is very difficult and the notion that the U.S. can somehow solve what is a sectarian, complex problem inside of Syria sometimes is overstated … Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will call for immediate action, jumping into stuff that … gets us mired in very difficult situations.” But he won’t tell Americans the blunt truths they need to hear: We can’t fix Syria. Or Egypt. Or most other places. We don’t even know how to fix our own problems.

Obama tends to couple even such mild reminders of U.S. limitations with Lake Wobegon-style cheerleading. “Around the world there is a new feeling about America,” he enthused to Air Force Academy cadets in a 2012 speech. “There’s a new confidence in our leadership … The United States is stronger … and more respected in the world.” The United States is “the greatest nation on earth,” he gushed a few months later. Just this month, in the very same CNN interview in which he cautioned against rushing to action in Syria, he insisted that America is “the one indispensable nation.”

I’m sympathetic to Obama’s plight. Every time he tries to be halfway honest about declining U.S. power, the right jumps all over him. But his failure to be honest also comes with a cost.

When the president keeps insisting that the United States is the greatest/strongest/most beloved/most powerful country on Earth, here’s what happens: The rest of us start to believe it, and we start to demand results that match the rhetoric. If we’re so awesome and so strong, why aren’t we fixing Syria? Why aren’t we intimidating the Russians and getting the Egyptian military to behave and generally controlling the world as we see fit?

To Americans accustomed to a stream of triumphalist, exceptionalist rhetoric, Obama’s failure to act forcefully in the face of other states’ bad behavior doesn’t look like the wisdom of a president who understands the increasing limits of American power — it just looks like hypocrisy, lack of interest, or baffling passivity.

If Obama could bring himself to speak more honestly about the limits of American power, he might well pay a short-term political price — but in the long term, he might also find Americans much more willing to cut him some slack.

More important, some increased presidential honesty about the decline of U.S. power might refocus Americans on the things that we can change. We can’t fix Egypt or Syria, but we can make sure we don’t provide money or weapons to actors who will use them to slaughter their own people. We can describe the world and its tragedies accurately, instead of destroying the English language in a foolish, ineffectual attempt to maintain our “influence.” (See: The coup we won’t call a coup). We can make sure we only engage in military interventions when we’re quite certain we can do more good than harm.

Most of all, we can turn their attention to fixing some of the glaring social and economic injustices in our own society — and we can try to live up to the human rights and rule-of-law standards that we have long urged on other states by taking a hard look at U.S. counterterrorism policies and their impact.

This is an argument for honesty, not for isolationism. We need to remain globally engaged, and yes, at times that may require the use of military force — but our engagement should be predicated on a healthy understanding of our limits.

And who knows? If we devote more energy to living up to our own values and less to scolding or “punishing” others, we might find ourselves becoming a truly indispensible nation once again: a nation that inspires not resentment, but hope.

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.

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